War: an appalling memorial to September 11

The first anniversary of the appalling atrocity of September 11, 2001 has just passed. There was something grimly voyeuristic in much of the media coverage on the countdown to the occasion, a sense that broadcasters and journalists were lost for what might be an appropriate form of response and ended up unintentionally revelling in something that, in truth, was nothing less than gruesomely tragic.

The memories evoked by September 11 are a sensitive subject, and one about which it is not easy to get the tone right; as a result, there were times, listening to radio coverage in particular, when I felt thoroughly uncomfortable: there was something forced and arch about much of what was broadcast, as if too many programmes and producers felt the need to go to New York to see what could be drummed up.

To say this is not at all to minimise the terrible pain and trauma inflicted on the inhabitants of the greatest city on earth, and especially on those who lost loved ones in the destruction of the Twin Towers. In truth, however, New York might have been best left to get on with the process of remembering and of healing, on its own terms.

That acknowledged, it is inescapable that September 11 still casts a powerful shadow over all of our lives. We are all now familiar with the reality that a terrorist culture exists among a small but potent class of Islamic activists. There is a genuine fear that they may strike again, with similar devastating effect. Anything less than a heightened level of vigilance would be entirely unacceptable in the circumstances. But the response currently being planned by the US, with the support of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, goes way beyond that kind of essentially defensive thinking.

Far from being designed to prevent unjustified killing, the battle plans that are currently being cooked up in Washington will guarantee the certain loss of thousands of innocent lives. The assumption, of course, is that the US and whatever allies they can cobble together will prevail. But this is by no means certain. And if a bloody war is embarked upon, and it does drag out, who knows what the cost may be in terms of human suffering and lives lost – and not just in Iraq itself, but all over the world? But George Bush and Tony Blair seem hell-bent on proceeding irrespective of the consequences.

The arguments that have been advanced to justify an attack on Iraq are utterly unconvincing. There is no doubt that it is right to work assiduously at preventing Saddam Hussein, and Iraq, from developing nuclear capability. The pressure on Saddam to allow weapons inspections, under the auspices of the U.N., must be unrelenting. To make the leap from there, to the conclusion that it is right to invade the country over which he presides, however, is perverse and wrong, especially given that intervention of that kind will almost inevitably lead to the wholesale slaughter of Iraqi civilians.

Whatever about the stupid and bellicose puppet figure of George Bush, who is merely doing what the US oil interests demand of him, it is far harder to understand how Tony Blair has allowed himself to be sucked into this way of thinking. He seems to be a man not just of reasonable intelligence but of political and moral idealism. Or that was how most commentators had read him at least. However, he has begun to sound more and more bloated with his own importance, infatuated with the idea that he should be seen as a great world leader.

It may be that Tony Blair is convinced that, deep down, this is really a religious war. It may be that he believes that the Christian west, in effect, has God on its side. It may even be that he has decided that the atrocity of September 11 provides the best possible pretext for an all-out onslaught on those Islamic activists, and States, who might ultimately challenge Western hegemony. I want no truck with Islam, any more than I do with Christianity. One religion is almost as mad as the other and any drift towards fundamentalism of either kind should be resisted in every way that is legally possible and morally justifiable. But justifiable resistance to the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism does not extend to invading Iraq.

A clue to Blair’s thinking is to be found in the opinion pages of the Observer, a paper that has been very strong in its advocacy of the Blair agenda. “Failure to act against dangerous states imperils all of us,” the sub-headline to last Sunday’s editorial runs. And the leader goes on to assert that inaction against states which threaten regional and global peace is not an option.

It is mind-boggling, the extent to which someone as clearly well-intentioned as the editor of the Observer, Will Hutton, is blind to the different interpretations that inevitably will be put on that kind of rhetoric in different parts of the world. You don’t have to be Palestinian to argue that no state represents a greater threat to world peace than Israel.

And is there a more dangerous state on earth right now than the United States of America? Not if you are an Iraqi civilian, there isn’t. So, from an Iraqi perspective, failure to act against the US is not an option?

This is the kind of thinking on which the architects of the terrorist attack on the twin towers thrive. It is the kind of thinking which will ensure that they – and others like them – will strike again. It is the kind of thinking which proves that there is little difference in the motivation of those ruthless forces and the armies of the west.

It is the kind of thinking that may plunge us into a bloody and catastrophic war, with terrible consequences for an untold number of people. It would be the worst possible memorial to the people who suffered and died on or as a result of September 11. It must be resisted with every power of persuasion we can muster. Until the first missile is launched, there is hope that a morally repugnant and politically treacherous war can be avoided.